Due to the explosion of growth in the communication and information industries, people are able to access more information in more ways than ever before. Moreover, communication devices such as telephones, fax machines, pagers, personal digital assistants, and a myriad of Internet accessing devices are increasingly becoming more easily portable thereby allowing the consuming public to remain “plugged-in” or “connected” to the vast array of information regardless of where they travel and regardless of the time of day. Though most would agree that this increased access to information has benefited both the business sector and the consuming public, there is a growing concern about information overload. Information overload, as discussed in “Beat Information Overload,” an article published in the February 1997 issue of PC World, refers to a phenomenon in which the consumer finds himself inundated with information. More particularly, the consumer becomes overloaded because he must filter through all of the incoming information and decide which he will absorb and respond to and which he will not. Because he is forced to spend more and more time each day coping with mass amounts of incoming information, the consumer experiences lower efficiency and productivity. The increasingly portable nature of communication devices further compounds the problems associated with information overload because the consumer finds himself unable to escape the incoming information.
Cellular telephones provide a good example of the potentially disruptive effect of uncontrolled incoming information. Specifically, cellular telephones are often carried on the person of the subscriber throughout the day. As a result, there is a greater likelihood that an incoming call will occur at a time when the subscriber is otherwise occupied such as, for example, while the subscriber is in a business meeting or driving a car. Moreover, a ringing telephone requires immediate attention whereas other forms of communication may be handled at the convenience of the recipient.
Presently, there are a limited number of communication systems that give the consumer at least some amount of control over incoming information. For example, one of the presently available systems, known as call forwarding, allows a cellular user to automatically send all calls addressed to a different telephone to his cellular phone, or vice versa. Another system, known as caller ID, enables a user to automatically screen calls from a particular caller or a group of callers. More specifically, using caller ID, a cellular telephone user may program his cellular phone to ring, or not ring depending on his preference, when calls from a particular number are received. Yet another system, referred to as Wildfire Electronic Assistant®, is a digital answering service by which a user may control which phone calls are received and which are forwarded to voicemail.
Although these systems provide the consumer some amount of control over incoming information, all are limited in that none afford the consumer control over information received at a communication device based on the geographical location of the communication device. For example, none of the systems automatically filter incoming information, such as a telephone call, based on the location of the recipient's portable telephone or based on the location of any other communication device. As a result, cellular telephone subscribers and other communication system subscribers receive telephone calls and information regardless of where they may be located and regardless of the inconvenience that may be attendant to receiving such information at such a location.
Thus, there is a need for a method and apparatus that provides location-based communication processing wherein the processing of a communication signal is based on the geographical location of a communication device.